I originally started my Forj forum project ( http://forj.heroku.com/ ) after getting really fed up with how terrible forum software is, but I've not had the time/motivation to keep working on it lately, so I'm glad Discourse is there to hopefully give the likes of phpBB a kick into the 21st century.

Occasionally, startups will ask me for advice. That's a shame, because I am a terrible person to ask for advice. The conversation usually goes something like this: We'd love to get your expert advice on our thing. I probably don't use your thing. Even if I tried your thing out and I gave you ...

Hideous, over-complicated forums where content is in such a minority like that are exactly what drove me to try making my own forum software. There's so much that can be done better, yet all these forums do is add more features that make them slower and more difficult to use.
http://forj.heroku.com/
I wanted to make something that felt fast and lightweight, and I believe I succeeded. Obviously it's not ready for general use, as it's been put on the backburner with quite a few essential features missing (an admin section being the most obvious, along with any kind of deployment guide. It also doesn't work that well on smartphones/iPad).
I really wish I had the time to work on it again, as I'd love to see it used in place of the ugly messes that most places have.

When Joel Spolsky and I set out to design the Stack Exchange Q&A engine in 2008 – then known as Stack Overflow – we borrowed liberally and unapologetically from any online system that we felt worked. Some of our notable influences included: Reddit and Digg voting Xbox 360 achievements Wikiped...